IN THE
ENOSPHERE

Artist, producer, video maker
and inspired creative partner of countless musicians, from the early days of
Roxy Music (which he co-founded in 1972) to David Byrne, David Bowie, U2, Jon
Hassell and Harold Budd, not to mention Laurie Anderson, John Cale, Gavin
Bryars, Robert Fripp, Terry Riley and Russell Mills (and there are plenty
more), Brian Eno is much more than a clever minimalist. Witness the chords in
The Drop, one of his most recent solo offerings, which offers a subtle
assemblage of delicate, enchanting and elliptical miniatures. Taken in
isolation, these chords would simply not exist. The situation is a bit like
that of the sound pictures set up by John Cage and Morton Feldman, which are
determined by chance and brought to life only by the minds of the performers
who interpret them.

Eno has always been fascinated
by the idea of a rootless conceptual music with no aural landmarks, no defined
meaning. Hence the fortuitously conceived Discreet Music from 1975,
which establishes the principle of a smooth musical surface, a kind of black
hole capturing the imagination the way a Calder mobile catches reflections in
the light.

Three years later, with the
support of the former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt, his Music For
Airports initiated the concept of ambient music - a discreet form where
notes make their entry almost imperceptibly. The aim here was not to reassure
with the kind of catchy, familiar jingles that you hear in public places. "It's
a particular color, ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to
think. Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening
attention without enforcing one in particular."

With Thursday Afternoon
(1985) and above all Neroli(Thinking Music, Part IV) (1993), he
extended his concept of a "functional music" that suggests rather than insists
and is even more subtle in its shimmering, deep harmonies. Each sound, hanging
by the trail of its resonance, spins like a sphere in its own organic space.
Music for thinking.

The group Bang on a Can has
just recorded an acoustic version of Music for Airports1,
which it has performed in airports several times now. You and Robert Wyatt
decided to go along and hear them at Stansted, near London. How did you
react?

"I had already heard the
record in airports five or six times. But this was very different. It was very
moving and, after the concert, several people told me that it had them crying
on the first few bars."

Do you understand the
reasons for this emotion?

"I felt it myself, and I think
it came in part from that absurd devotion, that hopeless undertaking to try and
make an exact copy of something that is difficult to reproduce. In fact, I
never imagined that Music For Airports might one day be played live,
like a facsimile of the original2. This humility is moving,
flattering. It's strange to think a piece I recorded in two and a half days has
aquired a kind of immortality. I thought it would be ephemeral. But it has a
new life beyond the record. A part of me has become immortal, out of my
control."

You explained that in
Music For Airports you were trying to create music that was both morbid
and "comfortable." Is this something you sense in the Bang on a Can
version?

Even more so. Their version is
even more theatrical. This is because the musicians are there in front of
you and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're
listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is
more important in live music. Moreover, when you try to copy something, you add
to it. For example, the dynamics of the piece are very flat, whereas at certain
moments they accelerate: the contours of the piece change, take on a more
theatrical quality, are more alive and human. It's odd, because I was aiming
for impersonal music, without contrast. This was because the airport music I
had heard always had a human voice singing, which I found very irritating. You
don't need that kind of thing in an airport - there are already enough voices,
all kinds of announcements. Even when there's no voice, you recognize the tune:
"Michelle, ma belle..." Nobody had really thought about this question, and yet
we are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music,
an ambience. Still, no composers have thought to write for these modern spaces
which represent 30% of our current musical experience.

AN OPEN
SPACE

How did you go from the
concept of Discreet Music3to that of ambient
music?

First of all, I noticed that
my friends' listening habits had changed. In the 1970s people started having
fairly decent hi-fis, instead of the old record players, and this changed the
way we listen. People started noticing the aural surface, the richness of the
textures. I realized that this was what the recording studio was for: to change
the texture of sound, to make it more malleable. That, more than the melody,
rhythm or lyrics, was what I wanted to concentrate on. When I started making my
own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in
the foreground. It was the background that interested me. As in a painting, I
wanted to get rid of the element that up to then had been considered as
essential in pop music: the voice.

Does this relate to your
obsession with depersonalizing art?

Yes. If you leave your own
personality out of the frame, you are inviting the listener to enetr it
instead. Take a landscape. As soon as there is a human subject, however tiny,
it captures all the attention. It's inevitable. So I started playing around
with the voice, deforming it, merging it and ended up abandoning it altogether.
My record On Land4 is an attempt to transpose into music
something that you can do in painting: creating a figurative environment. At
the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to
make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest
art because it was abstract, not figurative. In contrast, my intention in On
Land was to make music that was like figurative painting, but without
referring to the history of music - more to a "history of
listening."

Does this approach mean you
have to forget your models?

It is not a matter of cutting
yourself off from your references, more of getting rid of artificial
distinctions. Classical music is founded on a very clear distinction between
music and noise. In rock, as in electronic music, these barriers are coming
down. I dreamed of a music without barriers, taking in classical instruments,
new electronic instruments and "non-instruments" such as frogs, birdsong and
simple noises. This, I thought, was my palette. I have all these elements
available to me; I am free to work with them as I please.

Still, you have maintained
the melodic aspect, unlike Lou Reed in his Metal Machine
Music5...

Metal Machine Music and
Discreet Music came out in the same week. What a contrast! Metal Machine
music is designed to be inaudible, agressive, a challenge thrown down to the
listener. I had the opposite intention: "See if you can resist!"
[laughs] I wanted to immerse people in a dreamlike state: "Use whatever
necessary."

Is seduction an important
aspect for you?

Yes, because I think that if
you want to make someone feel emotion you have to make them let go. Listening
to something is an act of surrender. "Okay, I accept the world that you are
offering me. I am happy to live there for a moment." This is the nature of any
cultural undertaking. You agree to momentarily break off your activities, to
enetr another world. I like to obtain this attitude by means of seduction.
Aggressivity is another way of achieving that. Zen methods, breaking habits,
that makes people mad. My way is the opposite of that. I have always learnt
things out of fascination.

Discreet Music has inspired
others, Metal Machine Music hasn't...

That's because agressive music
can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's
inevitable.

Didn't your CD Nerve
Net, from 19926, herald the principles of techno? On the
cover you even wrote: "This recording is like paella."

Yes, it's like paella, all
kinds of things mixed up. At this time I was looking for a new way of writing
music. The song called "My Squelchy Life" - I wrote it, then I interviewed
about thirty people and got them to read the text. After that I took snatches
of phrases from here and there, constantly changing the voices. It was rap!
Once again I will come back here to my central concern: how to get away from
personalization, from the idea of the singer with the microphone. It's close to
the video technique of morphing, Surrealist collage. Here, the same story was
told by several different people. I like this record. I always knew that its
time would come! [laughs] For ten years Music For Airports was
dismissed as crap! For many years the word "ambience" was an insult. It meant
"weak, lacking in identity, disposable, without personality." Exactly what I
was aiming at, in fact!

How do you react to the
fact that your work has had only tardy recognition? For example, in My Life
in the Bush of Ghosts7, before everyone else, you sampled voices
from all over the world.

That was before World Music.
First of all, I never had the impression that in my work I was always having to
fight against everyone else. I have always had friends who supported me, or
pretended to! What's more, I wasn't the only precursor. When I was working on
My LifeHolger
Czukay was doing the same kind of thing. So was Jon Hassell. I didn't have
the impression I was inventing anything. It was in the air at the time, this
process of universal absorption. Up till then people had used sounds from
elsewhere to give their music an exotic appeal, like in the 1960s with The
Beatles. As for what it's like to be acclaimed years later, well: it feels
good!

THE STUDIO AND THE AURAL
IMAGINATION

And yet when you heard
Graceland by Paul Simon8 you felt as if thousands of
tourists had just turned up on the little beach you had discovered and spread
their trash everywhere.

I have a strange relation to
that album. I love it, but it's one of the few things where I have an
ideological blockage. When I hear it I think it's very good. And my resistance
is just jealousy: I could have done that! I too went to Africa, to Ghana. I
worked with lots of musicians over there. I dreamed of collaborating with them.
This was after My Life. For My Life, I began by composing the
music and then I added the foreign voices. There I wanted to do the opposite,
which is more conventional, but I was fascinated by these rhythms, these ways
of playing. I made a lot of recordings in Africa. Back in New York I had the
idea of writing songs, but everything I put over the music degraded it! I had
to leave things as they were. This music existed without me.

What do you feel about the
current abundance of discographic information about all the different countries
in the world? And all the crossovers?

I have mixed feelings. When
it's done arrogantly, it's awful. The philosophical idea that there are no more
distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a
drag! I like differences. The idea of a unified world is so naive, so boring. I
don't want a planet where everyone agrees. I am favor of the proliferation of
differences, individualities. At the moment we have a very good group in
England, Cornershop, which makes very original pop music, a mixture quite
without arrogance. One of the members is of Pakistani origin. He grew up
listening to English pop and Pakistani music. That's more enriching than the
eclectic attitude that consists in condescendingly helping yourself to folk
musics from all over the world. I take a bit of Africa, a bit of Peruvian pan
pipes, this Javanese gong... I hate that.

In 1977 your album
Before And After Science9 and the one that came out of your first
collaboration with David Bowie, Low10 both had a "fast" side
with short songs, and a second "slower" side with long
instrumentals.

That was the mood at the time.
It comes from the 1960s, when people were trying to get away from the pop song
format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter. I remember a song by
Spirit, "Free," which lasted just a minute. A real gem. It made a big
impression on me. People started to understand that there was a lot you could
do on a record, that it didn't have to be an hour of instrumental music like
The Shadows at the beginning of the '60s. But this style fell out of favor at
the end of the '60s and there were only songs. Then it came back. People wanted
to create a sound world using the studio, and not just to tell a story.
Low is a good example of that. It presented some very strange landscapes
amd told the stories that took place inside them.

What was your method for
composing with Bowie on Low?

Every collaboration helps you
grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. The secret of our success is... My
strength is that I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments.
That inspires him. I also have a definite talent for convincing people to try
something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form I can sell anything. For
half an hour! If it doesn't work, we try something else. Bowie is very
receptive, incredibly quick on the uptake. He catches something, uses it in a
surprising way and changes my own perception of it. I try to prepare things
before he hears them, because he's very quick.

Did you use your set of
oracles with him, your "Oblique Strategies" cards?

For the first records, yes. We
had a lot of fun. We both drew cards, secretly, without saying what we were
trying to do. Sometimes we went in opposite directions. David's card said:
"Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action," and mine: "Change nothing
and continue with immaculate consistency."

Was there any
conflict?

In those cases, yes! The music
was like a place of Hegelian dialectics in which everything was in
conflict.

You travel a lot. Does that
help you write?

It's not the destination that
matters. It's the change of scene. When you're far from home, you start living
in your music. Music is my true home! I find it difficult to compose here, I'm
so relaxed. You have to be ready to recognize the world you want to create. If
I work here, everything is so familiar that I can't do it. All I do is record
my work on a CD and go and listen to it somewhere else. Then I can hear it
better.

What made you go and live
in Saint Petersburg?

I wanted to go and see a place
that not many people were interested in. It was my wife's idea. She thinks
that's where the future is. And I believe she's right. This year I have spent
only one month in England. I have lived in countries that were coming out of
conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic, and it was fascinating,
because people there are overflowing with energy. When I went back to England
after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by
the weight of tradition.

If you had to choose a
selection of your collaborations?

That would be a good idea for
a record. It's hard to answer, I've done so many! I would exclude my work with
composers, which I collected on my first label, Obscure11, because
those weren't a real collaboration on my part. Rather, I was trying to pay
special attention to other musics which, for me, at the time, represented new
concepts, a new way of thinking. But in this ideal selection I would include
Harold Budd, Jon Hassell and others for whom I have not only been a producer
but also a very close collaborator: Talking Heads, notably, with the album
Remain In Light12, David Bowie, most of the things we have
done together, and U2, of course, even if my input is not as important on every
title.

What for you is the
difference between a producer and a collaborator?

With Harold Budd, for
example... he didn't just come along and say "Hey, Brian, produce this record
for me, will you." Likewise, for my own part, I didn't say: "Go on, Harold, you
must play that." Each individual stays on their own territory. It's more like:
"Ah, you're doing that, well, I'll do this, and we'll see what happens." He
sits at the piano and I create this aural environment around him, just as he
might himself. That's what it was like on most of my collaborations.

Is there an element of
seduction in this process?

What I like to do in this kind
of situation is to turn up with lots of things that are ready, that I've
thought about. I don't try to make something happen, with the risk of finding
myself at a loss, saying, "Ah, what are we going to try now?" I want to be able
to work without any hitches. So I prepare a lot of very different things. Every
time, I visualize what I need. Put it like this: I imagine in advance the music
we could make. What path are we going to take? This one or that one? And so on.
I need to think about the multiple directions we are going to take.

Does this method have to do
with the fact that you are not a musician in the classical sense of the
term?

I think so, yes. Because
before I go into studio and find out how to use a certain number of machines I
have a certain number of "conceptual" visions of what I'm going to do. I am
full of ideas, and I want to have the language to translate that idea and go
faster. if you don't really nourish your work, you start out all confident,
everything is going well, and then you run into a problem and no one can help
you, you're at a dead end. I hate to be blocked. It doesn't help you in any
way. in fact, I like to think about the path I'm going to take - and there are
so many of them. But I know i won't try to zigzag between difficulties. The
lines must be clear and laid out in advance.

Are you really a
non-musician, as you have repeatedly claimed? I mean, you have put your name to
so many compositions.

I started using that
expression when I understood what kind of musician you can become when you
study music. It struck me as much less interesting than what an art student
could be. There is so much English music that is influenced by art schools - to
the good, of course. The students in those schools are so used to music
teaching, so aware of it, of the styles and of the way music is a part of our
culture. I don't mean to generalize, because there are some excellent
musicians, but when you study music in the classical system, you are always on
the inside. When someone is composing a song, they ask do I write in C minor,
or perhaps with a diminished seventh here... I think that to offset that you
need a lateral approach, even if they call you a non-musician. And so much the
better if I don't understand what I'm doing, or I don't analyze it with the
specialized terms that they teach us. I use instruments the way a painter makes
a canvas, with a great variety of objects and tools, without really thinking
about it. I use the term "non-musician" in this sense, about this specific way
of approaching music, without the constraints of the technical details
surrounding composition. The problem of technique shouldn't arise. Phil Spector
was the epitome of the non-musician. I don't know if he plays an instrument,
but his contribution to style is essential, and on a very different level from
that of a classical songwriter.

(1) Music for Airports
(Point-Philips, 1998).(2) Ambient 1/Music for Airports (EG,
1978).(3) Discreet Music (Obscure-EG, 1975).(4) Ambient 4/On
Land (EG, 1982).(5) Metal Machine Music (RCA Red Seal,
1975).(6) Nerve Net (Opal-Warner, 1992).(7) My Life in the
Bush of Ghosts (EG, 1981).(8) Graceland (Warner Bros.,
1986).(9) Before And After Science (EG, 1977).(10) Low
(RCA, 1977).(11) Obscure Records (10 records). Between 1975 and 1978 this
label created by Eno published not only his own Discreet Music but also
the first offerings from Gavin Bryars, John Adams, Michael Nyman, Harold Budd,
John White, Christopher Hobbs, Max Eastley, David Toop, Jan Steele and The
Penguin Cafe Orchestra, plus new interpretations of works by John Cage (by
Richard Bernas, Robert Wyatt and Carla Bley!).(12) Remain in Light
(Sire, 1980).